This essay examines the tragic fates of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary through the lens of self-centeredness, impulsivity, and the dangerous pursuit of external happiness. Drawing on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the paper argues that both women fail to find inner peace because they look outward — to love, money, and social status — for fulfillment. Rather than confronting their own identities, they construct delusional realities, follow destructive impulses, and ultimately contribute to their own downfall. The essay draws on scholarly criticism by Mary Ann Melfi and Wendy Perkins to support its analysis, concluding that the happiness both women chase is fleeting compared to the contentment they could have found within themselves.
The paper demonstrates thematic comparative analysis: rather than summarizing each novel separately, it identifies shared themes (self-deception, impulsivity, constructed reality) and uses those themes as lenses through which both texts are read simultaneously. This approach allows the argument to build progressively, with each section adding a new dimension to the central claim about self-destructive behavior.
The essay opens with a broad cultural framing before narrowing to its thesis. Subsequent body sections each address a distinct thematic strand — self-knowledge, impulsivity, delusion, and external trouble — applying each to both protagonists in turn. The conclusion widens the lens back out to comment on human nature and modern society, giving the argument a circular, satisfying shape. Citations appear as page numbers for primary texts and author names for secondary sources, consistent with MLA style.
It is a classic human trait to make life more difficult than it needs to be. We live in a self-centered society, and those with their focus turned inward usually generate enough drama for the rest of the population. The need for more has always been around — the old adage that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence endures because it is human nature to think something is missing and that something will make life better. Two authors who explore this concept are Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert. In Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, we have a wealthy woman who senses something is wrong with her life and is bent on finding out what that something is. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, we meet Emma, who is not wealthy but is on the same path as Anna — unhappy and longing for more.
Both women believe they know what they need to bring them happiness. They are like millions of other people at any given time; they seek their desires and only manage to make their lives worse. They teach us that there is certainly more to life than money, because if money and social status were all one needed to be happy, Anna would be the happiest woman of her day. Her unhappiness forces us to look deeper at the situation, because even love and adoration prove insufficient, as we learn with Emma. These women lead drama-filled, self-centered lives that could be far less complicated if they stopped being ruled by emotion, yet they illustrate the complexity of the human psyche and its apparent inability to make clear and coherent decisions at all times. Anna and Emma are simply human, and their characters reveal that happiness is not as complicated as they make it out to be. The happiness they chase is fleeting, while the happiness they need is within them — if only they would open their eyes to it. Anna and Emma's lives are tragic because they allow society and their own selfishness to guide them down the wrong paths.
Anna and Emma never stop or slow down enough to practice Shakespeare's adage of being true to oneself. While giving in to selfish impulses may feel like authenticity at first, too many haphazard impulses create an individual who is divided and full of contradictions. Selfishness is pleasurable until it drives everyone away. Anna and Emma lived successfully on the surface, but underneath they were wasting away because they had nothing in which they could believe. Mary Ann Melfi writes that from the beginning of Anna Karenina, Anna has a "tendency to let the outer world mold" her "in a way which prohibits the inner life from flowing into consciousness" and becoming a "motivator" (Melfi). Anna does not want things to be complicated. Emma, on the other hand, does not mind complication as long as she gets what she wants — or what she thinks she wants. Neither woman truly knows who she is, and this is the beginning of her problems, because she cannot even begin to look within to find herself. Neither can find a moral center on which to lean.
At one point, Anna finds herself "terror-stricken" and asks herself, "Where am I? What am I doing?" (432). She feels it is "impossible to struggle" (432) in this state. In this scene, we see how confused she is, which indicates she has nothing upon which she can fall back. She cannot look anywhere and find answers to these questions, nor can she go anywhere to relieve the anxiety she experiences. This is more than confusion on Anna's part: throughout the novel, she has moved away from who she is, and this only serves to hurt her because she cannot find peace. Her fatal mistake is her failure to seek any kind of inner peace for solace. Instead, she divorces herself from any such notion and continues down the same path she has followed for years. She is detached from the world around her and "eventually she creates a delusional inner reality disconnected from her external facade, and the schism begins to generate a fault line which signals her eventual breakdown" (Melfi). She rationalizes her behavior by saying nothing. She is lying to Karenin, which leads to her lying to herself. She is not true to herself, and she feels "shame" (Tolstoy 20) because of it. Her shame ultimately leads to a self-loathing she does not fully recognize for a long time.
Emma, too, is unsure of who she is and who she should become. She allows herself to become titillated by fantasies. Her shallowness coupled with unhappiness leads her to believe that an affair will somehow improve her life. Like Anna, she thinks immediate pleasures will eradicate the emptiness she feels. Emma does not have the same choices as Anna because of her socioeconomic situation, but viewing the two women side by side reveals that money does not buy happiness. Emma sees her affair as a way to move up in society; she associates it with sophistication and exclaims, "I have a lover!" (163). We can see what Emma cannot — that she has only complicated her life with false expectations and ridiculous fantasies. Truth begins on the inside, and these women make the grave error of looking to the outside to discover who they are.
Anna and Emma are tragically impulsive. While impulsiveness might seem exciting at the onset, it generally leads to future discontent. Anna suffered from increasing unhappiness despite the fact that she was supposed to be happier. She deliberately removes herself from her past, thinking this will ease her mind and improve her life. Instead, we read that she was "horrified at herself, her utter insurmountable callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits, to the people she had loved, who loved her" (282). This is what Anna faces every day — whether or not she admits it to anyone, including herself, this feeling sits planted deep in the recesses of her unconscious. Anna's impulses guide her to revel in her past, a choice that leaves her detached from the world. She never looks back, but she "resides in terror" (Melfi). Greater impulses lead Anna to more obsessive behavior and, "with the aid of morphine, becomes driven, her monolithic, external concern dominating her mind" (Melfi).
Emma's tragedy stems from the fact that she wants more than what society will allow her to have — but even larger than that is her belief that getting more can actually bring her happiness. Her tragedy is twofold because she believes her own lies. She follows impulses while thinking they are intuition, making her situation even more unbearable. While Emma's society was somewhat puritanical in its attitude toward her — as seen when Madame Tuvache says Emma is "compromising herself" (104) — Emma is still creating many of her own problems. Like many people with her affliction, she is determined to keep doing the same thing she has always done, with no hope of ever changing what distresses her most about her life. She will never stop following her impulses because they are the only things that bring her a temporary reprieve. These women place too much hope and faith in emotionally-driven choices, which rarely lead to long-lasting contentment.
These novels demonstrate the complexity of human nature, revealing that things are never as clear as they seem to be. We live in a society increasingly centered on self, and the value placed on what is truly important has shifted inward in ways that threaten mankind's ability to lead productive and fulfilling lives. While Anna and Emma lived in a different age and their worlds differed from ours, their humanity remains the same. They were still pursuing something they thought might make them happy. They were not strong enough to know who they were, and they gave in to self-seeking pleasures.
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